by Anne Stuart
“I’ll get a cab,” she said and hurried off.
HIS PLAN HAD BEEN to tell her that during refueling a problem had been found, but the “Everything’s A-OK, Mr. Stratton,” from a cheerful young man in coveralls who greeted them at the plane made that impossible.
He looked down at the mountaintops and the clouds as he flew home and thought he could tell her that Herrick Field wouldn’t allow them to land because of a fuel spill or something, but that wouldn’t work because they’d just be redirected to Portland International. They were going to be home for dinner if he didn’t think fast.
If she’d been a little more open about how she felt at lunch, he might have talked her into coming back to his place when they reached Portland—for his own personal purposes as well as those of her father and his captain.
But she was determined to get the damned linens back.
He was mentally exploring other options to keep her away from the restaurant until tomorrow when he heard the smallest break in the sound of the engine. It was an almost indiscernible flutter that didn’t belong.
He sharpened his attention, scanning the controls while he listened. Altitude, speed looking good—whoa! In an instant, everything changed. Speed slowed considerably and he began to lose altitude.
Fear tried to rise in him, but he reminded himself that this wasn’t an F-14. There wasn’t much time to think at the speed of an F-14, but this was different. Instinctively he tried to figure out what was going wrong. He had plenty of fuel, so the sounds of fuel starvation didn’t make sense.
He decided not to focus on what had gone wrong, but simply to look for someplace to land.
He felt Kat turn to him. “Something wrong?” she asked in a calm voice he was sure she’d had to work at.
“Yes,” he replied honestly. “But nothing I can’t control.”
“Until we get to Portland?” she asked hopefully.
“No, until I get us down.” He looked out the window, assessing his options. This wasn’t the best place to go down. They were over the snow-covered Siskiyous, which extended from southern Oregon into northern California. They hadn’t passed seven-thousand-foot Mount Ashland yet, so they hadn’t crossed over the Oregon border.
The mountains were craggy and only small pockets of population existed in its cozy nooks and crannies.
She closed her eyes. “Oh, God. I left dirty laundry in the hamper, and I still owe thirty-two hundred dollars on my car.”
He pulled back on the yoke as they descended, searching for a high meadow he knew was right around here somewhere. “Hold it together, Katarina,” he encouraged.
“I am together!” she assured him in a very high voice. “And I’d like to stay that way, but I’m not going to, am I, if you crash this plane?”
“I said we were going down, I didn’t say we were crashing.”
“Going down means crashing!” she disputed. “Flying requires us to stay up!”
“We’re going to fly down,” he corrected calmly, hoping his faith in his ability to do that wasn’t misplaced, “until we land.”
She looked out her window. “On what? It’s all mountaintops and…and…”
“There’s a wide meadow coming up,” he said, watching for it. “Right…there!” And there it was, snow-covered but wide and surrounded by small enough trees to stop them without killing them—hopefully.
“Hang on,” he said.
“Can I do something?” she asked, her voice a shade shy of hysteria. “Give me something to do!”
“Trust me,” he said. “That’s something you can do. This is a task you can’t take charge of, Kat. Just sit quietly and let me do it.”
“If you kill me,” she threatened, “I’ll see that you’re fired without severance pay!”
He ignored that nonsensical outburst and concentrated on getting the wheels down and easing onto the meadow, hoping the snow wasn’t too deep.
It wasn’t. He skated along the top of it, Kat making strangled little sounds as they pitched and rocked and headed for the trees.
“Trees!” she shrieked at him.
“They’re going to stop us,” he told her.
“Permanently?” she asked, holding on.
“You’re supposed to be trusting.”
“I am,” she said, but she had a hand over her eyes.
TERROR WAS a new experience for Kat, but a corner of her mind not totally focused on whether she was going to live or die thought there was a weirdly stimulating excitement about it. She could feel her heart beating, her blood moving, her lungs expanding and contracting. She’d never felt so alive!
Then they were skating on the snow and speeding toward the trees at an alarming rate, Hal’s knuckles white on the controls as he tried to steer toward a small opening.
She dropped her hand. If this was it, she wanted to see it coming to get her. She wanted to create the reality in her head that she was riding into it bravely, facing the unavoidable with a fearlessness she’d never had in life.
She regretted that now—that she’d worried so much about things. That she’d fretted about her father appreciating her business skills, when he’d always given her his love. That she’d harbored jealousy of Giulio. That she’d micromanaged Hal’s performance at the restaurant because he’d resisted her efforts to control him and she needed so much to feel in control of something.
And now he’d claimed to have lusted after her for those two weeks, claimed she was beautiful.
There was that flutter! Even as they sailed out of control along the brink of death! The search and rescue crews were probably going to wonder why they found her body with a smile on her face.
The motor cut suddenly and there was an eerie silence as they sped along the snow. That was followed by snapping sounds as they reached the trees. Even without the motor, the noise was loud as they rushed into the woods like a stick run along a picket fence. Snow flew around them in spooky whooshes, and she closed her eyes when she heard tearing noises. She could only imagine as they spun around that a wing had snapped off.
They pitched and rocked and there was a sudden, vicious jolt. She got one glimpse of Hal’s tense profile before blackness consumed her.
SHE FELT A HAND on her face. Through a weird mist that seemed to be part dream, part vision, her head hurt and she wasn’t able to open her eyes. But she knew what that touch meant. Her Adonis had come at last. He probably wanted to make love to her, to give her their first daughter, and she couldn’t even draw a good breath.
“Kat,” she heard him say. He sounded a little desperate.
Eyes closed, she groped for his face. “I’m here,” she said, her voice sounding frail, her breathing labored.
“Kat, wake up!” he demanded. He opened her jacket and unbuttoned the waistband of her jeans.
She smiled, loving that he was anxious for her. She wanted him. She struggled to open her eyes, to embrace him, but her eyes and her limbs refused to cooperate. “Take me,” she said breathlessly. “Give me our daughter.”
She heard a surprised voice reply, “Our daughter?”
He didn’t know. Maybe men couldn’t see into their futures like women could. “We’re going to have four,” she explained.
There was silence.
It couldn’t be that he didn’t want their daughters, she thought frowning, trying to will her eyes open. It had been ordained. She was sure.
“Kat, wake up,” a firm voice said finally. “I’m sure if I take you up on your offer, you’re going to take me before a judge and swear that you never made it.”
She puzzled over that response as something cold was applied to her forehead and her cheek. The cold tore the gauzy half dream right out of her head and she opened her eyes to find herself looking into Hal Stratton’s face as he wiped snow off her cheek with the sleeve of his sweater.
This obviously wasn’t her dream life or her Adonis.
“Back to reality,” she grumbled as he tried to rebutton her pants. She slapped his hand awa
y and did it herself. “Or did we survive?”
“We survived.” He put a diagnostic hand to her head. “How do you feel?”
She tried to assess that. “Okay, I think. A little headachey.”
He nodded. “You hit your head on my shoulder when we lost the wing and spun around. Can you move your arms?”
She raised both and flexed them.
“Legs?”
There wasn’t much room to move them but they didn’t hurt except for the top of her right knee. She rubbed a hand over it. “Doesn’t feel like anything’s broken. Just banged my knee on something, I think.”
“Good.” He touched her cheek with a cautious index finger and she drew back when it hurt. “You’re going to have a shiner,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
It would have been satisfying to hold him responsible for it, but unfortunately, not fair.
“I’ll take a shiner over a toe tag,” she replied. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah.” He indicated the crunched radio under a smallish tree that had fallen neatly over the nose of the plane. “Radio isn’t, though.”
She looked around for her purse. “I’ve got a cell phone somewhere.”
“I’ve got one, too. No signal.”
She kept looking for the purse she’d tucked near her feet. “I’ve got one of those phones that works almost everywhere.”
Hal considered pointing out the peaks and promontories all around that blocked reception, but he knew better than to argue with her. He sat back in his seat and waited until she’d found the small black leather pouch that had been hidden by a blanket and a backpack he kept in the back of the plane. They’d tumbled free during their wild turn.
“Ah, here we are!” she exclaimed with a triumphant smile, delving into her purse and holding up the phone. “Salvation!”
Salvation, he thought, was a pretty big word. He watched her punch out a number with the tip of her small index finger, then hold the phone up to her ear.
The smile turned to a frown almost instantly and she lowered the phone and studied it. She turned it off, then on again and stabbed in the number once more.
She lowered the phone with a dispirited pursing of her lips, hit a few keys, growled then tossed it back into her purse. “No signal,” she said.
“That’s what I said.”
“Yeah, well you also said you were taking me to San Francisco, then back. Unless you scheduled a stop on a mountaintop for sightseeing, I’m not sure I’m required to believe everything you tell me.”
He considered his police training a really good thing at the moment, because he wasn’t sure his temper would have held without it. She was so gorgeous, and he was so attracted to her, he barely knew what to do with himself, but he’d about had it with the smart mouth and the fickle moods that made her stare longingly at him one moment and verbally claw at him the next. He’d like to understand what was behind that ambivalence.
“Look,” he said. “We’ve got a problem here. It’s not insurmountable, but it’s going to require a little pulling together. Do you think you could stow the smart remarks until you have an audience that appreciates them?”
She bristled. “Don’t get huffy with me! This is not my fault!”
“Well, it’s not mine, either,” he retorted. “I love this plane and I always keep it well maintained. I don’t know what happened. Clogged fuel line, or something. But it shouldn’t have. I just had it serviced. You might consider yourself lucky you were flying with someone with enough experience to get you down in sufficient good health so that you could yell at him!” His voice had risen considerably at the end of that sentence and he paused to draw a breath and start again more quietly.
“Try to bear in mind that this isn’t Umberto’s and you’re not in charge here. I am. And if I don’t like the way you talk to me, I’ll head off on my own and leave your pretty little backside right here.”
“Who says you’re in charge?” she asked after a brief shocked silence. The question was challenging, but her tone had an edge of restraint in it.
“Have you been lost in the mountains before?” he asked sharply.
“No,” she replied.
“Then I’m in charge. I know what I’m doing.”
“Oh. You’ve crashed here before?” She used that careful tone and her expression was bland but he still recognized the sass under it.
“No,” he made himself reply quietly, “but I’ve hiked these mountains with my brother-in-law, Jack, and I had wilderness training in the military.”
She sighed and wrapped her arms around herself. The cockpit was mercifully unbroken, but the outside air was well below freezing. “I’m sorry,” she said. She sounded sincere. “I’m just a little…shaken.”
He reached for the blanket that had tumbled out of the back and handed it to her. “That’s understandable. Wrap this around you while I figure out just where we are and look for a trail out.”
She offered the blanket back to him. “If you’re going outside,” she said, pointing to the sweater he wore over a long-sleeved shirt, “you’re going to need the blanket.”
He shook his head and grabbed the down jacket always stashed behind his seat. He’d used it a couple of times when the weather had changed during fall fishing trips with Jack.
“Take care of the blanket. We’re going to need it tonight.”
He had to push hard to open the door and leaped down. Just before he closed the door again, he heard a muffled word of alarm come from the huddled bundle that was Kat.
“Tonight?”
CHAPTER FIVE
THOUGH TERROR had been a new experience for Kat, she hadn’t really known what it meant until Hal slid down a snowy slope and disappeared from sight. She sat alone in the cockpit of the plane, holding the blanket tightly around her, and prayed that he’d meant to do that, that he hadn’t fallen into some crevasse, never to be seen again. Because then, of course, neither would she.
But her concern for him wasn’t entirely selfish. While she didn’t really like him, she did find him gorgeous, and she had a grudging respect for him. Particularly since she’d learned a few things about him today she hadn’t known before.
She hadn’t known he’d served in the military, that he did family things like hike with his sister’s husband, that he knew things about the outdoors she hadn’t a clue about. She’d been a big-city-girl all her life, and the one and only time she’d been camping with a friend and her family the summer between her junior and senior year, she’d hated it. She never wanted an overnight experience more primitive than a room at a Hilton hotel and a short walk to the nearest Olive Garden restaurant.
Yet, here she was, faced with precisely what she hated.
And her cheeks flushed as this thought crossed her mind even though she was all alone—had all that stuff she’d said in that half dream after she’d banged her head been said aloud? Presumably that the hands she’d thought had been her Adonis’s had been Hal’s.
Had she actually asked him to…take her? To give her their first daughter?
“Oh, God,” she said aloud, pulling the blanket up to cover her face. How could she possibly explain that? And after his smart remark about taking her up on her offer to sleep with him, did he think she was just reissuing the offer?
She felt happiness and relief when he reappeared suddenly over the lip of the mountain. Then remembering the questions she’d just asked herself, she felt embarrassment.
Fortunately for her, embarrassment wasn’t as new to her as terror. She had a real working knowledge of it since her fiancé had married her best friend.
She leaned over to push open the door on his side of the plane as he approached. He swung inside with ease and closed the door, his cheeks red from the cold. He blew into his hands and rubbed them together.
“There’s a trail right over that ridge,” he said. He dug a map out of his backpack and filled half the cockpit with it when he opened it. He pointed in the middle of lines and squiggles that mea
nt nothing to her.
“I’m pretty sure this is where we are. If I’m right, there’s a little town called Nugget about five miles away. There’s even a road to take us there.”
“But no vehicle,” she felt required to point out.
He folded up the map. “True. But hiking five miles on a road is preferable to even half a mile over this terrain.”
“Can we make that by nightfall?” she asked, praying for an affirmative and two motel rooms.
He shook his head as he dipped it to look out the cracked windshield of the plane. He pointed to the sky and a dark mass of cloud moving fast. She hadn’t even noticed it while lost in her own personal concerns.
“It’s going to snow pretty soon,” he predicted. “Doesn’t look like a big system, but we don’t want to get caught in it. If it stops by morning, we’ll try it.”
“We won’t freeze overnight?” she asked worriedly.
“Of course not. We have body heat and a thermal blanket.” He dug into a backpack behind his seat. “Not to mention a couple of energy bars, a few bottles of water, and a flask of brandy.”
“Very civilized,” she said. “I always thought the Victorians had the right idea about picnicking and camping. White tablecloths, china table service, candlesticks, the old Victrola.” She was chattering, but she didn’t seem to be able to stop herself. “Of course, your energy bars don’t match their chicken and pork feasts, but we could pretend it’s something more elegant. We can start with the brandy.” He was watching her analytically. She was very aware of their confinement in this very small space and all the room the tension around her seemed to be taking up. She was going to choke on it. She didn’t know what to do except keep talking. “Or, I guess it’s more proper to end with the brandy. But if we’re going to keep warm, we may have to have it before, during and after the…”
“Kat.” The simple, quietly spoken sound of her name stopped her as effectively as if he’d shouted. He nodded. “Yes, I did hear you ask me to make love to you,” he said. “I know you were in a mild state of delirium so I restrained myself, but I can’t help but wonder where that came from. I mean, there was probably some basis in real desire if that’s what came to you when your body was in turmoil.”